Monday, 24 October 2011

I recently visited a local school where Hannah the reception teacher kindly read a mock-up my 'Rabbityness' book. I'm very grateful for the children who sat and listened a lot more intently than I ever did as a child, and even joined in with some of Rabbit's actions such as hopping, burrowing and twirling of whiskers. After a talk about the story we all rolled up are sleeves and got nice and messy and as you can see the children produced some 'beautiful' pictures of Rabbit doing all sorts of unrabbity things such as skiing, jumping in paint and climbing up a colourful mountain, here are just a few examples. It never ceases to amaze me how spontaneous children's imagination is but in the same breath sad that we seem to lose some of that spontaneity in the growing up process, or maybe our heads just get over filled with too much other stuff!

Sunday, 23 October 2011

I'm thrilled to say my first picture book will be published by Child's Play International in March 2012. For me this is a special story that's very close to my heart, and was a development of a diploma project I did whilst studying on the MA Children's Book Illustration course at Cambridge. Joining the course has been just the best thing in so many ways, a creative journey which sometimes entailed frostbite from location sketching, overeating whilst avoiding completing the dissertation, nail biting crits' but mainly an incredible source of inspiration through fellow students, lecturers and visiting illustrators in a nourishing creative atmosphere! I shall miss it greatly when we complete the course in Feb!